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2017

  • 2 min read

The OCF is hiring!

Update April 8, 2017: The application period is over and we are no longer accepting applicants. Thank you so much to everyone who applied!

The OCF is making a big transition to having a completely self-staffed front desk next semester, and as part of that process, we are looking to hire students to be OCF Operations staff for the 2017-2018 academic year! This includes two paid positions, Operations Assistant and Operations Manager, neither of which require any technical experience. These are very important roles, and without dedicated and passionate students to fill them, the OCF will not be able to stay open next semester.

Operations Assistants

Operations Assistants will have the following responsibilities:

  • Staffing the front desk
    • Maintaining lab security
    • Providing help to OCF members using the lab
    • Carrying out regular lab maintenance
  • Working on projects that benefit the OCF
    • Marketing and outreach
    • Collecting feedback on OCF services
    • Organizing events taking place in the lab
    • Researching and applying for additional sources of funding for the OCF
  • Attending regular meetings with the Operations Manager and the other Operations Assistants
This job position will be paid $13.75 per hour. See the full job description for more details.

Operations Manager

The Operations Manager will have the same responsibilities as the Operations Assistants (see above), except they will spend less time staffing the front desk of the OCF, and instead will spend the remaining time performing more managerial duties, such as leading meetings with the Operations Assistants, delegating projects, and scheduling shifts for the OCF front desk. This job will involve more responsibilities and use of communication skills than the Operations Assistant role, but it is also paid more, at $15.75 per hour. See the full job description for more details.

Application

Applications closed on Tuesday, April 7th at 11:59 PM. If you are interested in applying for a future position, you can contact us for more information.

  • 2 min read

OCF seeking interest in high-performance computing service

The OCF wants to hear from anyone who is interested in the possibility of participating in a free high-performance computing (HPC) service that we will be offering starting next academic year. Our eventual goal is to make intensive computational facilities student-run and freely avilable for all students and researchers in the UC Berkeley community.

Our current, tentative itinerary is to make an initial hardware purchase by the end of the spring 2017 semester, then purchase additional hardware in the fall based on input from interested parties and feedback from a trial run in the summer or early fall. Depending on the success of the service after it launches for the entire campus, we will consider expanding it in future years to accommodate even more projects of varying sizes and needs. To that end, we have created a survey for those who might like to see their project run on OCF hardware:

OCF HPC interest form

To anyone who may consider hosting a current or future project on our open computer infrastructure, we urge you to fill out this survey as best as you can, using estimations if you do not have all the hard data. We want to see the full breadth of projects on campus that have unmet computing needs. Our first server is planned to feature multiple high-end graphics cards, a many-core CPU, and spacious quantities of RAM and storage, but we will need as much input as we can get to make informed decisions if we want to make high-performance computing a reality for as many as possible.

To student groups in particular, we would like to select a few candidates for our trial run on limited hardware. We will use our experience on this outing to iron out wrinkles and anticipate obstacles that may come up during a full run. If this sounds interesting to you, please let us know in your response.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us!